


The Other Side

by MumblingSage



Category: Constantine (TV)
Genre: Asexual Character, Bad BDSM Practice, Blasphemy, Consensual Kink, Don't Try This At Home, M/M, Masochism, Mild Sexual Content, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Platonic BDSM, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sadism, good thing he can heal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-11
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-17 08:11:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3521885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MumblingSage/pseuds/MumblingSage
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His guardian angel is curious about pain. John Constantine's an expert. They both might be getting more involved than they prepared for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> I'm a slooow writer, which is perhaps a good thing in this case. I started this fic in the middle of the season and have revised it a bit in light of the finale. Not enough to spoil, but hopefully enough to be...ambiguous. I'm continuing to believe Manny's an angel, whatever else he is, and I hope you'll play along with me and interpret references to "guardians," "charges," and "ministry" with some flexibility.
> 
> Also, one of these characters is immortal and the other one is downright reckless (especially in chapter 2). Please don't try any of this at home. Just because it's consensual doesn't mean it isn't monumentally stupid. There are resources out there on safer ways to do BDSM.

Pain always takes John Constantine by surprise. Not in the sense that he doesn’t seem to expect it, but instead the opposite: hurt drops by like an old, unwelcome friend. _You again?_ his entire body seems to ask, startling to rigid attention. _So soon?_

 _But of course_ , comes the answer, always, and the realization melts through him. This is how it’s supposed to be. Shoulders, spine, curled fists and wiry forearms go soft with surrender, and only belatedly spasm with renewed resistance. Tension and release play across his features, a complex composition the angel never tires of studying.

The angel—whose name is _not_ Manny, although those two syllables suit human tongues and psychology far better than the real one—has seen mortals in pain before, of course. It’s perhaps _the_ major theme of his ministry. As his charge, John has been beyond quintessential: the angel has watched him suffer in one way or another nearly every day of his life. It should have gotten depressing or boring long ago. But somehow they always find new depths. In Gary Lester’s dying, the angel has seen absolute mortal agony. Physical, mental, emotional, even spiritual. He’s seen John weep, and more, he’s seen John let him see it.

But this is different, made much more interesting by a simple change in perspective. The angel’s seen pain before, but never inflicted it with his own (or borrowed) hands. Never had such proximity. It’s the next best thing to actually experiencing it.

The whole thing was John’s idea.

As soon as he put the glass jar containing Imogen’s beating heart on the shelf, he reached for his cigarettes. He put one in his mouth and drawled around it, “So are you anxious about these consequences you’ll be facing?”

Despite the drawl, or perhaps as the cause of it, he handled the words as if they were heavy; carefully. The concern behind them seemed genuine. Which made it, if nothing else, a virtue worth encouraging.

“I’m not looking forward to them,” Manny answered frankly.  John’s eyes narrowed behind a thread of smoke—an expression the angel had seen before, over his shoulder, so to speak. It was a look that said enough. _You poor bugger_.

If the angel wasn’t mistaken, it also held a quantity of admiration. John Constantine thought he had the measure of how much bravery it took to break Daddy’s rules.

“You know,” Manny said then, folding his hands, “not everyone has the particularly unfortunate family experience you grew up with, John.”

He snorted around the cigarette and was clearly about to say something barbed, and most likely blasphemous, although that was inevitable from comparing his father to the Almighty. Not that John had never done it before. A guardian angel really had their work cut out with this one, Manny thought, and not for the first time.

He saved them both from the blasphemy, at least, by adding, “And anyway, angels aren’t really capable of suffering in the way you might imagine.”

“No.” Punctuated by the red glow of the cherry. “As feeling as rocks, you lot.”

“In a way. We don’t feel physical pain.”

“Lucky you.”

“I’m not bragging, John.”

“Of course not, mate.” He turned away to arrange something, succeeding more in stirring dust than real organization. “You’re not missing much.”

“I think we might be.”

John chuckled, but his shoulders were drawing tight. “Take it from an expert—”

“Do a mere three decades of life make you that?”

“You might have doggy-paddled through the Flood, but I’m the one speaking from experience here.” A mortal might have found the expression John turned on him oddly disarming; he wasn’t smiling, but it wasn’t mean-spirited enough to count as a smirk.

If you knew to look for it, you could find vulnerability in such an expression.

“I know,” the angel said. He kept his voice soft. Gentle. “That’s part of what fascinates me about pain. It proves what humanity is capable of enduring. What _you’re_ capable of,” he added, with subtle emphasis. John could take that last or leave it. 

“And you envy us for that?”

“Not just for the pain. For everything.”

The half-smile absently grew wider. Despite himself, John’s curiosity was piqued.

“You’re right,” Manny told him. “We’re as unfeeling as rocks. It’s a dull way to spend eternity.”

“So bad you’ll try anything to break up the monotony?” John’s eyes narrowed, gaze sharpening on some new idea. “Maybe you really _are_ begging for a punch every time you act like a wanker. Which is all too often.” Before the angel had to find a reply to that, he continued, “But it wouldn’t work, would it? My fist wouldn’t even land.”

“I wouldn’t recommend trying it. Have we ever talked about your pathological obsession with violence?”

“Me? I’m not the one envying the mortal ability to suffer.”

“Now that you mention it, there is one way to discover those experiences for ourselves.” The angel glanced at the shelf, the jar half-filled with dark fluid, the mass of flesh pulsing within it. “I have to admit I’m not _that_ interested.”

Even John looked subdued at the thought. For angels who fell—to Earth or to regions further below—pain was the definitive experience. Painful death or eternal torment, in either event they had it even worse than humans, who might find the occasional glimpse of pleasure in recompense.

“What a bloody design flaw,” John muttered under his breath. 

He might not have meant to be heard, but the angel couldn’t resist saying, “Certainly not one you’re in a position to fix, but thank you for the sympathy.”

John returned to his profitless organization, the angel watching in silence for several minutes. The cigarette pack was rediscovered and ensconced in a place of honor, presumably, on another table; John paused to study the curving, blunt-edged blades of a ceremonial knife before shoving it to the back of a shelf. He turned suddenly. “What, you still here? I thought this was the point where you would flap off, sunshine.”

“Sunshine?” The angel raised his eyebrows. “I thought I was the ugly one.”

Again, John’s expression was too good-natured to count as a smirk, and not earnest enough to be anything else. “The pretty one fooled me, didn’t she?” After a moment’s silence, he added, “Well, I’ve admitted I sometimes make errors in judgment. What more do you want?”

The angel didn’t answer right away, a fact which made both of them go very still, waiting, half-wary.

What did he want, indeed. “No demonstrations of punching, just so we’re clear.”

“Oh, we’re still on that? If you’re curious about pain, you should just _pay attention_ , mate.”

“You’re assuming I don’t.”

“I could show you.”

At first impression that could be taken for a threat, no matter how hubristic. But at once John looked like he regretted saying it, which didn’t match his usual attitude of belligerence. The angel was left wondering what exactly he had let slip.

“If you wanted to know,” John continued, “I mean _really_ know, I could show you a lot about pain. At leisure. You could study it. Might be a bit of an eye-opener.”

It could even be endearing, how earnestly he spoke, as if he had anything to teach a being that predated civilization. However much of an expert he claimed to be.

More than endearing, it was intriguing. The angel had to wonder what would prompt someone to make that kind of offer.

“I’ll consider it,” he said.

Most likely, it was a ploy on John’s part—like the entire conversation. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t sincere, only that sincerity was just another tool in an intricate arsenal. Means to an end. In this case the angel suspected the end was to build rapport, or perhaps morale. As if a few moments of shared intimacy would make him more revealing or more cooperative.

It wasn’t a bad plan at all.

The angel thought he might go along with it, for the exact same reasons.

**#**

“By the divine power that holds the balance, bring forth your servant of ministering.” There is something tight, almost breathless to the words, sent out in a rush. At first the angel thinks this might be an emergency. “By your wisdom and your justice, your will be done.”

No “please.” Too much of a rush for courtesy. But as he manifests in a close, dark space redolent with dried myrtle, the angel sees no sign of disaster. Which is both unusual and surprisingly refreshing. And above all intriguing. He looks around the room.

This is the Winters mill house, he can tell from both the décor and shape of the room—in both physical and metaphysical senses. He focuses most on the physical. No windows, which explains the closeness. It’s not quite stuffy, though; the camphorous smell of myrtle in the warm air would make a human with her eyes shut mistake it for a eucalyptus grove. It contains a few tables of varying heights and no chairs. John Constantine sits on the floor.

A haze of candlelight fills the room. Lit tapers, votives and what even appears to be the bottom half of a long-abandoned Paschal candle crowd the tables and make crossing the floor a slow proceeding for anyone even pretending to a physical form. As he weaves through them to approach John, the angel sees that they really are burning on every available surface.

The top buttons of John’s shirt are open, a sheen of sweat on the revealed skin. His eyes are closed, his legs folded. The backs of his fingers are spread on his thighs. A small tea light, brimming with melted wax, fills each palm.

The angel crouches slowly, careful of startling John while he’s balancing fire in his hands. Metal gleams under flame where his lighter lies on the floor beside him. A dusting of dried myrtle surrounds it.  

The angel’s memory stretches back to Eden, but he doesn’t recognize what sort of ritual the magician might be dabbling in now. Of course, John’s demonstrated an impressive ability to bring up spells Manny has overlooked. Or else he may have invented something.

There’s no particular sense of power in the room, though, and that’s unusual for a spell. Aside from his own presence in answer to the summons, and some of the eldritch atmosphere of the mill house, the angel can’t detect any disturbance. It’s unlike John to use any subtle or slow-building magic, and equally unlike him to involve Manny in a mere practice run.

It’s not impossible to surprise an angel. Just damn difficult.

And bloody impressive when it does happen.

He doesn’t have to give any sign of his surprise, and so he doesn’t. Not being fully embodied, he could give the impression of touch only by a concerted effort, which he also doesn’t bother with, at least not yet. He continues studying John in silence until the human notices his presence in his own time. The man’s eyes are almost closed; every so often a tremor passes over the lids. Although this isn’t magic, he’s concentrating hard on whatever it _is_ , with an expression caught in tension that verges on ecstasy.

As if waiting for something.

They wait together.

Flame has hollowed the candles out into thin-walled cups, filled with pools of clear, hot, liquid wax. In an instant, the heat spreads too far and the walls crumble. As the dam breaks, wax flows over John’s fingers and splatters his wrists when he jerks to awareness at the sensation.

Obviously, it hurts. Not immense pain, not agony—it might even be a relief after balancing the heat and flames to let it spill and snuff them out—but it’s a sudden, intense sensation few mortals would willingly seek out.

This one has.

As the angel processes that realization, every burning candle in the room goes still. Currents freeze in the air, and a profound silence settles over the mill house now that the angel has assured no one will arrive to interrupt them. At least not until time runs again.

John’s eyes blink open as he takes in the preserved moment. He blinks again as he sees the angel’s face before his. “Hello, there,” he says as if he weren’t expecting it.

“Did you summon me here to see this?”

“I thought it might interest you.” His voice is soft, distracted, so that it’s hard to tell for once if he intends to be sarcastic.

“Yes, it interests me.”

John relaxes fractionally, as though this is a reassurance he needed.

“After all,” the angel says, and lets himself smile, “this isn’t the most compromising thing I’ve found you doing.”

He winces. “Do I even want to know?”

“ _Puzuzu,_ John.”

“Oh. Right.” A deeper wince. Whatever voyeurism he might have feared the angel indulged in clearly paled in comparison to the misadventure of less than a fortnight ago.

“You seem to have developed a way to cope with your stupidity by immediately blocking out any memory of it.”

“You know me. For the really bad cases it takes a little shock therapy.” John’s words grate, but the sarcasm seems to sting with the same cleanness of the hot wax, settling the tension in his posture and expression. Not pleasant, but worth seeking out. Pain promises to be an interesting study, but so does human humor. Both through the lens of John Constantine are sure to offer a warped perspective, and yet the angel doesn’t mind.

“I saw you looking over events, as it were. You could have come down and joined us for a drink afterwards. If you…drink…that sort of thing.”

“I don’t. But thank you for the offer.” The thought crosses the angel’s mind that John intends this as some sort of apology. But that seems unlikely. _John Constantine doesn’t do sorry,_ the sister had said. She would know.

“As it happens, I wouldn’t have shaken Anne-Marie’s hand if she’d killed you,” the angel adds. “Not least because we _do_ need you…”

“I didn’t call you down here to talk business, mate.”

“Of course not.”

At John’s huff of laughter or relief, the candle flames bend again. A flush of warmth heats the air—something the angel processes intellectually, without of course feeling it himself. Nor can he feel whatever makes John hiss through his teeth when he clenches his fists, then unfolds them, making wax flake loose. The skin beneath is pink, and looks tender but uninjured.

He wiggles his fingers next, freeing them for movement. He rolls his sleeves back farther, enough to reveal a tattoo on his left arm just below the elbow.  He paints a line towards with another candle, letting wax fall in fat petals against the thin skin on the inside of his wrist. His breath comes unsteadily, as if he’s doing something tricky. Or uncomfortable.

A moment’s flare of light as an impurity in the wick of the cheap candle ignites, sputtering flame. Surprise as much as the sudden intensity of heat makes John grunt. His face contorts; it’s neither dignified nor pleasant.

The angel’s breath would catch, if he needed to breathe.

He tips his crouching body forward, as if being a fraction of an inch closer would make a difference to his vision. As if he could sense more than he was capable of watching, just by coming nearer.

John doesn’t seem to consider this an intrusion, if he even notices it. Sweat trickles past his open collar, and he swipes at it with his free hand before taking up the candle again. The wax on his skin is seared in a marbled pattern from the flare. It is like nothing the angel has ever observed before.

“You see?” His voice tightens again as a hot drop rolls over a curve of muscle. Liquid, it’s almost transparent, but turns opaque as it hardens. “You just need to pay attention.”

“Well,” the angel says softly, “you are the expert.”

He sees the flash of a grin before John bends in concentration again. He’s layering wax over wax, making a pattern the angel can’t follow. Maybe it’s one that can only be felt, not seen.

The next candle he reaches for is a long taper. John holds it upside-down and so close that the tongue of flame licks at his skin. This is more than flirting with danger—the odor of singed hair momentarily overtakes the smell of myrtle, and he pulls the candle back with a ragged sound forced through his teeth.

It’s bad. John had to have braced himself for it, but his face is washed gray with shock. His eyes are dull with it as they lock on the angel’s. And beneath the shock, he can see human intelligence; hard-scrabbling, appraising.

In terms of sheer anguish, this controlled—test? Demonstration?—has nothing on the burn of a cigarette snuffed against a child’s skin. Or a young man’s. He wonders if John would do that for him. Not that it would teach him anything—the angel knows plenty enough about the human capacity for cruelty. But perhaps it would make a point. He wonders if John resents him for not being, as he would see it, a better guardian. And if he does, does he think throwing his own capacity for pain in his guardian’s face would be sufficient accusation? Or revenge?

Or is John simply proud of it?

Not for an instant does the angel make the easy mistake. The ceremony, the flame, the intensity that verges on ecstasy—from someone else, this might look like worship. But not from John Constantine.

Which is just as well. Angels have fallen for worship. For taking the place between Heaven and humanity that they believed their due, by accepting the tribute of simple mortals who are after all easily confused, for giving in to a very real and very pernicious temptation. It’s good, really, to be able to rely on John’s stubborn irreverence.

As the bite of the fire fades, relief seems to affect John as strongly as the initial rush of pain. His head falls back, bringing the ends of his hair close to another flame. A sound from the angel makes him come alert in time to catch himself. To the angel’s very private embarrassment, the sound hadn’t entirely been intended as a warning. Though of course it wasn’t of anticipation. From the Coliseum to Jeanne d’Arc, he’s seen enough martyrs burning to have nothing to learn there.

When John started, the candle had been shaken out. Now he relights it, watching Manny over the kindling flame. “Any preferences for where I put the next one?”

He flips the lighter shut with a flick of his right wrist, holding the left mostly immobile as wax forms a shell on it. Another bead of sweat rolls over his neck. The angel tracks it down.

“Open your shirt,” he says.

There’s no reason for any particular preference. It’s not his body feeling the drop of hot wax. He’s just the audience—although apparently John derives some gratification for putting on a good show.

Something the angel realizes as the mortal magician smiles and cheerfully declares, “Whatever you say, sunshine.”

Happily, he proceeds without saying anything else. Nothing more overtly flirtatious—though of course the angel sees the risk of that; just because he’s indifferent to it, that doesn’t mean he can’t recognize a double entendre when he’s in the middle of one. John also doesn’t point out that by giving him direct orders, the angel is straining the bounds of his earthly role. He’s influencing events, and however insignificant those events may be, that’s still…frankly, it approaches perverse.

And yet the angel does relish it; he so rarely gets to tell John _exactly_ what to do. Much less be obeyed.

He’s never quite been responsible for causing a mortal pain like this. Never decided exactly where and how it will happen.

“There.” He touches skin with an intangible finger, but John seems to register the contact, not flinching, but going tense beneath it.

He winds up on his back, holding the flame high over himself, angling it so the wax falls approximately where the angel gestures. It’s an inexact process, with an exacting learning curve. The first time he misses wax almost lands on his eyelashes. He turns to avoid it and gets a smear across his cheek. He doesn’t rub it away, but blinks and lets his teeth grit together with a click.

“There,” the angel says, pointing again, this time at a tattoo that practically forms an essay explaining why it would be a bad idea to afflict this body with various forms of possession or disease. “Cover this.”

It should have no effect on the warding mark, but it requires a lot of patience, a lot of hot wax. A lot of pain.

Over the course of fifteen minutes, burning down two of the small votives, John does it.

“Now…there.”

He doesn’t say whether it’s too much or not enough. Whether the angel is choosing targets that are too sensitive—next the hollow of his collarbone, one nipple, a track following  the narrow trail of hair that leads down from his stomach—or overlooking an ideal site for torture, or whatever this is.

“Here?” This time it’s a question as much as an order. The angel would like feedback, by this point.

He doesn’t say anything aloud, but he does strip out of his trousers and let the next beads of wax fall over the chosen point on his thigh.

“What does that feel like?” the angel asks.

He frowns at the question. It seems he isn’t sure, and he has to do it again to test the sensation.

“It’s…hot,” he says. “Hot, and it only grows hotter. Just when you think it might be getting better, another drop falls, and it—it was stinging at first, but now it’s just dull, almost an ache, like a bruise but angrier. It sticks, this stuff. And when it builds up, it just forms more insulation. Like I’m baking in an oven here.” Suddenly, he drags a hand across his left forearm, raking away layers of wax. The skin beneath shows in deep red lines. “Once it comes off—you feel brand new, without the weight of it and the heat. And you feel everything that so much as brushes you.”

He rubs the red with his fingertips, then seems to brace himself before using his nails. “ _Fuck,_ ” he breathes, without seeming particularly upset. Just impressed.

“Do you do this often?” the angel asks in as bland a tone as he can. The question still makes John glare at him.

“Haven’t had much chance,” he answers. Maybe he means he hasn’t had much reason to.

He lets new wax fall over the freshly bared skin, both hands trembling in fits and starts. He curses when he can’t hold still, but again it doesn’t seem to be prompted by frustration as much as is by the same thing that  causes the trembling in the first place.

The angel is accustomed to thinking of heat as good—a quality of sunlight, fuel for growth, living beings. He’d called the Rising Darkness by a term John would instinctively understand, but among angels it might be known as something else—as a growing cold, a leaching of energy (and perhaps some humans could grasp that, too—even martyrs burning would be better than that). The First of the Fallen has a cold voice, enough to build up as ice around the acetate that contained it. Even fallen angels don’t like listening to it.

In fact, it might be pleasant to feel drops that burned, hot and growing hotter. To feel pain that proves it is there. To sample the defining mortal experience, the quality that makes them remarkable: to _endure_ , and maybe something more than that.

“Can you keep going?” he asks John.

“A bit more, mate.” The words come thicker than usual, though, and the angel realizes they don’t have much longer, at least not this round.

By the time they’re through, John’s body has become a mosaic—more than half naked, he’s a pattern of sweat-slicked skin, dull wax, flushes of ruddy sensitivity. A blister is forming on his arm, and a few others across his chest. He’s careless of them, and when one pops beneath his fingertips as he rubs away stray wax, he groans the first obscenity that sounds truly angry. Followed by a whole string of them, describing inventive acts that make more sense euphonically than anatomically. It becomes progressively more remarkable and less harsh. By the time he reaches for the towel and bowl of water he’d left waiting in a corner of the room, he seems downright cheerful.

It feels like it would be wrong to leave John right away, after—whatever that was. After watching him in pain, putting him through pain. If the angel had kept silent, had refused to give directions or confessed himself unable, would any of this have happened? So he lingers. But to give John some space, he walks around the edge of the room, examining its boundaries from the aged boards of the physical walls to some intriguing twists of its metaphysical corners. Beneath the swish of a cloth through water, he hears John humming. The tune is interrupted by a catch in his breath as he scrapes off more wax, but as he wipes down the skin beneath he begins singing.

“ _If I should fall from grace with God_

_Where no doctor can relieve me_

_If I'm buried 'neath the sod_

_But the angels won't receive me_

_Let me go-o boys_

_Let me go-o, boys—”_

Privately, the angel thinks this is a little melodic for John’s usual musical taste, and he wonders if he selected it especially to needle him with the lyrics. The suspicion gains support when he comes around and meets John’s gaze. He stops singing with a nod that is just too prim. “You probably prefer psalms.”

They let a moment pass looking at each other. What John’s seeing, the angel isn’t sure. He looks…content, sitting there, with the blood beginning to show in his face, his mouth not fully shut, his eyes widening.

The angel smiles. And he recites, in a soft and clarion voice, “Dark am I, and lovely, daughters of Jerusalem, dark like the tents of Kedar, like the tent curtains of Solomon—” and, skipping far ahead to perhaps his favorite line, “beautiful as the moon, clear as the sun, and awesome as an army with banners.”

John swallows, belatedly closing his mouth. “Yes. I mean—right, then. That would be you.” He reaches for his shirt. “The kind of thing you’d like, I mean.”

“I didn’t mind what you were singing either, actually.”

The lighter makes a dry _tsk-tsk_ , like a disappointed aunt. Burned out. With a shrug, John reaches for one of the still-burning pillars to light his cigarette. The angel doesn’t let his eyes go to the Paschal candle in relief, for fear his look would be noticed. John must be expecting him to comment on unhealthy habits, but at this moment, it feels unnecessary.

He balances the cigarette in his hand, curling his fingers, breathing out smoke. “I could _really_ set them on fire,” he says. He raises the other hand, his left, and forms a fist a little gingerly. “In a manner of speaking. It’s a magic trick.”

“Would that hurt?” the angel asks.

“No,” John replies, after a moment’s thought. He sounds surprised, as if he hadn’t realized it before. “No, it wouldn’t.”


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Note: this chapter gets more intense than the previous one, so be forewarned for blood, self-destructive tendencies (John got that 'consent' part down but fails at 'risk-awareness,' which does not mean waving cheerfully at risk as it jabs you in your tender parts), and mild sexual content.

A mortal’s hand opens the door to the mill house, but the angel is the one to close it behind himself.

The door shuts firmly; floorboards creak beneath the weight of footsteps. The angel bends his head as he walks, listening to these unfamiliar sounds.

He finds John with a bottle in one hand that’s more than half empty and a cigarette in the other that’s freshly lit. An empty, dust-dry glass sits on the table, and John’s tie is a crumpled wad on the couch cushion beside him. His eyes are on the mirror. When the reflection suddenly changes from a memory of Gary Lester to the angel’s face above him, John nearly drops the bottle.

“Buggering _Christ_!”

“Not that I know of,” the angel replies. “I thought you might have heard the door.”

“Obviously not.” His gaze narrows. “I didn’t realize you knew how to use doors. Wait.” The mouth of the bottle points towards the angel accusingly. “Who are you wearing?”

Most likely someone John would just as soon not have discovering him in this state, but they both know that and so there’s no point arguing it. And beneath his flare of somewhat-intoxicated anger is genuine concern. Having escaped demonic possession not too long ago himself, John is understandably sensitive.

“I’m not ‘wearing’ anyone,” the angel says, pleased enough to reassure him on this point. “I’ve  reconfigured their physical mass and borrowed their—you might call it a probability wave function.”

“Don’t really think I would.”

“If you were a quantum physicist. It takes the likelihood of a collection of particles occupying any given space—”

“Right.”

For a magician, he sounds distinctly unimpressed.

“The upside being, your friend isn’t present while I’m standing here. They’ll be returned from a sort of indeterminate suspension when I leave, but they’ll know nothing about it. They don’t suffer like a mortal might during—” he makes a gesture meant to emphasize nonspecificity “—a demonic possession incident, and they won’t come to any harm unless someone makes the monumentally stupid decision to attack me while in this form. And even then, it’s unlikely to stick unless I’ve been bound into a human body, which would also be both monumentally stupid and vanishingly unlikely.”

“Right,” John says with finality. “Well, while you’re here, however you’re here, why are you even here? Aside from, obviously, to have me take another spin of the do-gooder chore wheel. How many more innocent souls are crying out for me to save this weekend?”

“None. Fortunately for them.”

“So what is this, a social visit?”

“In a way.”

John eyes the bottle, but in its depths he can’t seem to find the appropriate measure of chagrin.

“If you’re not in the mood—” the angel begins, but John shakes his head.

“No, I am.” He stubs his cigarette out in one ashtray and then pulls another from across the table. Something rattles and chimes inside it, iron against the glass dish.

“Nails?” The angel touches one and feels a swell of power. “John, are these—”

“Saint Padua’s coffin nails.”

“Relics?” he asks.

“You find all sorts of interesting things on the shelves around here.”

Idly, the angel picks one up. The other iron nail scrapes the bottom of the ashtray, turning to follow its twin. Now he realizes why the power he senses on the nails seems familiar; John had been wearing one when the angel found him ziptied to a grate in Chicago. “For when Saint Anthony just isn’t doing the trick, huh?”

“You have to _pray_ to Saint Anthony. The nice thing about a relic is that you can just use it, no chit-chat involved.” John swallows, and suddenly, here is the sheepishness the angel had been half-hoping to see.

“Need help looking for anything?” he asks, keeping his tone cheerful and helpful while managing not to break into a grin at the magician’s obvious discomfort. “Or do you have other plans for these?”

Part of the reason he avoids smiling is because he’s not quite sure what those alternative plans might be. Except that they seem to involve him.

John sets the bottle aside and flexes his empty hands. Fingers curling over palms, pressing into them. The gesture might be at least partially subconscious.

Angels, as a rule, do not have any subconscious reflexes. But with his borrowed mortal form, Manny makes a pensive sound that he knows John will find gratifying. “Do you want to put on another demonstration?”

“I thought you might be interested.”

He doesn’t admit it right away. “This seems…reckless.”

“What, between you and me? Neither of us are amateurs, mate.”

“I don’t need to ask where you got the idea.”

John shrugs. “Not after watching over recent events. Thanks for that, by the way.”

It would be a great deal safer to attempt this, too, with a guardian angel’s supervision, rather than—the angel studies John for a sign, subconscious or not. Would he really have tried on his own? For what earthly reason?

“When you received those stigmata in Shaw’s world, you were able to heal yourself with your mind. But this would be real.”

Their eyes meet. John’s aren’t sober, but they’re not intoxicated by mere alcohol. It’s not desperation for distraction, either, or not just that. Instead there’s something the angel almost finds familiar.

And then John says, “I trust you,” and with a blink his eyes turn guileless. Transparent.

Manny sighs. “I guess I should count myself lucky you’re not donning a crown of thorns.”

“I knew I could count on you, O unflappable one.”

If John’s disappointed not to get more of a rise out of him, he at least has a consolation prize. If this sort of game has a prize for him. If it is a game.

 _Humanity,_ the angel thinks, enduring the rare sensation of being out of his depth.

John returns from a back room with a length of fine-textured hemp rope. He loops it around one of the lower ceiling beams, then looks to the angel. He’ll need help for this next part.

The angel does not have any firsthand experience binding human beings, but John gives him precise directions. He kneels under the rope and holds his hands over his head. They rest back-to-back, palms out, the inverse of their position in prayer.

Before wrapping the rope around his wrists, the angel feels it with curious fingertips. The texture seems rough; not for ordinary uses perhaps, but for this. He knows John is going to pull against it, hard enough to bruise, strongly enough to bear the marks of it for days.

And maybe that’s what John wants.

All the same, the angel retrieves his necktie and ties it over his wrists first, so that the cheap but silky fabric provides some sort of cushion. John frowns at the unexpected sensation, but he doesn’t protest.

Then the rope, wrapped once, twice, and pulled up, until the line of it draws tight over John’s head. The angel ties it and steps back.

John shifts on his knees, but not by much; his body is forced taut, too, with barely enough slack to move. “I didn’t realize you were such a good hand at tying knots.”

The angel smiles briefly, as he suspects he is intended to. He looks over the magician: kneeling, bound. He looks abject, but the position also emphasizes the muscles of his shoulders and forearms. Human strength is not impressive, but it becomes more noticeable when restrained. When any risk from it is gone. A punch from him, the angel reflects, could be quite unpleasant. At least he would try to make it so.

_Have we ever talked about your pathological obsession with violence?_

“What?” John asks, catching his look.

“Do you think…”

“I’m trying to avoid it, actually.” And that answers several of the questions the angel hasn’t been able to voice. About what John wants. What he’s willing to do to get it.

The mirror gleams in the corner of the angel’s eyes, showing nothing but the present now. John’s mind may not allow him the same privilege. He _is_ desperate for distracting, for pain until thought shuts off.

But the angel has the oddest feeling that this is only the motive John prefers him to see. It’s true, but a surface truth, with something else going on beneath it.

 _I trust you_.

He takes the nails, still singing with quiet power, out of the tray. John shifts again, straightening his shoulders as much as the rope allows, bringing his chin up.  His eyes widen as the angel drops the nails in one of the pockets of his jacket.

He could tell John not to worry, they’re getting to that, but he doesn’t. He catches John’s chin between his fingertips and tilts his face up further. They look at each other, study each other in silence before John’s gaze slips away.

There are many more questions the angel has. Now would be the ideal time for them.

He should ask, _What were you thinking when you planned this?_

He should ask, _Are you sure?_

He should ask, _When should I stop?_

He doesn’t. John wouldn’t answer them. John, who shouldn’t want what’s coming but does, who is hardly an arbiter of wisdom in this or anything but who almost trembles beneath the angel’s hand from how much he needs it. He won’t meet his eyes now, which is unsurprising. His impatience is undeniable, yet he also seems more relaxed, more relieved at being bound than he was drinking.

The angel can be what he wants. Can be sure and uncompromising and unquestioning. It’s more than second nature to him.

He takes the nails out of his pocket.

When he presses the point to his skin, John’s breathing quickens. The angel doesn’t start with his hands. Instead he traces a wavering line with the nail from his opened collar down, over breastbone, over ribs, following the angle of his side to stop above one hip. Rope creaks, strained against in the effort to hold still. This is from pure curiosity, not just of the sensations but the experience of causing them. This time the angel isn’t giving orders nor following them. It’s _his_ hand doing this, doing things John can’t anticipate, can’t stop.  Wouldn’t stop.

He knows he can satisfy his curiosity because John is going to let him. He trusts him. But that doesn’t mean he isn’t taken by surprise at the circle the nail traces on its way back, scraping through the fabric of his shirt, leaving a growing red ribbon to trickle in its wake. It doesn’t mean his guard isn’t up—although that does no good.

He winces when the iron point follows a line in his palm. His eyes are shut hard and his bared teeth grit together. The angel finds the other nail and sets it against John’s other hand. He senses the thrum of power passing between them, then the sharp tug as they pull each other in.

A sound grows from the back of John’s throat, breathy and rough-edged.

The nails pierce his skin with something that cannot be called resistance. The angel knows the moment of the breach like an instant when time restarts again after being halted, a soft burst that proves irrevocable. There is some blood, but not much at first. Just a shudder of reaction. Everything seems to break into trembling motion. The angel’s fingertips around the heads of the nails are close enough to John’s flesh to feel it. If he was human, maybe his own hands would jar sympathetically.

It’s a good thing he isn’t human.

Cold sweat glistens at John’s forehead and throat, darkens his shirt and the roots of his hair. He tries to form fists against the intrusion of the nails, but that just forces the meat of his palms out, impaling them deeper. He didn’t expect it to hurt this much, the angel sees at once. Or he did, but he forgot what physical agony was like in the moments when he wasn’t feeling it, he understood its intensity but forgot just how unpleasant it was. These aren’t psychosomatic wounds inflicted in a dream, and he can’t control them in any way, and he doesn’t bear them quite so gracefully.

The rope hanging from the ceiling almost lashes at the angel’s face as it jerks. John’s pulling at it with all he’s got, out of an animal instinct to escape or struggle. But suddenly, with a spasm, his hands unfold. Offering again, defenseless. Seeking it.

It hurts, it hurts. Even the angel knows it with such instinct-deep certainty that it overrides consciousness, floods it with all-encompassing, immediate awareness. The kind of pain this causes is terrifying. The room smells metallic with John’s fear, with salt and blood and adrenaline. When he shudders, the holes from the nails are torn wider. Blood drips from the heels of his palms onto his hair and shoulders, flows over his wrists and forearms to his shirt cuffs.

A small, hard sound, almost a _crunch,_ rises as the nails strike bone. John’s head falls back until the angel can see the sharp angle of his Adam’s apple as it bobs with a suppressed cry. His eyes are open, but they’ve gone glossy, seeing nothing.

The attracting power between the points of the nails is what does most of the work; the angel’s hardly put any pressure on them at all. He just holds the iron in place. But if he didn’t—or if he tried to stop it—none of this would be happening.

He is causing this pain. It’s happening right there under his hands. But he still doesn’t know what it’s like.

“John.”

At first he doesn’t react to his name. The angel repeats it a little more loudly until his eyelids flutter.

“Righ’ here, mm…” His words slur, as if from intoxication or sleep. It’s not that he’s semiconscious—at least the angel doesn’t think so—because a fine tremor runs from his shoulders that suggests the opposite, suggests alertness and incredible focus.  He’s so aware of the pain that he’s losing track of how to speak.

So the angel surmises. He can’t know for sure.

“John…how do you feel? _What_ do you feel? How is it?”

John blinks at him.

The angel half-crouches to hear whatever comes next. One hand still holds a nail, but he lets the other drop to grasp John’s bound wrists, as if lending strength or support. He can be patient, but still he wills the magician to say something.

“How…do you bloody well _think_ it feels?” The words aren’t well-articulated, but their meaning is obvious. “A little fucking empathy just isn’t in your programming, is it, you haloed wank—” The last syllable is cut off as he breathes hard through his teeth, and the angel fights a smile that’s sure to be misinterpreted. He should have known better.

And after all, he doesn’t need a vocal description. He has eyes.

A fallen angel had told him what to look for.

_You feel helpless._

John makes fists again, even if it drives the nails further into his flesh, he’s clearly past caring.

_You can’t fight it._

Pain doesn’t only take him by surprise; it _infuriates_ him.

_It becomes about making it to the other side._

The angel watches, waiting.

_…shrinking your world down to_

_one_

_fine_

_point._

John has lost focus on the metal point transfixing him. He’s glaring at the angel, who isn’t even touching him anymore, just studying, and then his eyes roll back. His throat swells with another scream, but it’s almost silent. He’s not making it to the other side, if there even is another side, if there isn’t just this. Hurting. Helpless. Here.

This pain doesn’t come in waves, it has no rhythm, nothing to predict. It’s not going to end. The nails have slid home—dark iron heads flush against his palm, tacky with blood—so it won’t get any worse, but it won’t get better, either.

The angel wonders if speaking to him would help. Conversation would at least give him something to focus on. Or something to fight.

What should be said in this situation? _Do not be afraid?_

The time’s long past for that.

The angel says, simply, in a calm and carrying voice, “Should we stop?”

“Why?” John pants. “Have you had enough?”

His bravado is less than convincing and less than successful. The angel decides not to try asking any more questions. He stands and moves around John, circling carefully. Once John stops this current bout of struggling, he can step in and remove the nails, then untie him. Slowly.

But the moment he’s out of John’s line of sight, the magician’s breathing gets more agitated, and his hands jerk at the ropes.

“Now hold on a bloody second!” Even frantic, he’s suddenly articulate; how much effort it takes, the angel will probably never know. “Wait—don’t you _dare_ flap off on me, you winged—fucking—bastard…”

“I’m not.”

His reassurance seems to go unheard.

“You can’t fucking leave me here, you god-damned—”

The angel cuts him off with a ringing slap across the face. It stuns John into silence, and stillness too, long enough for the angel to grasp him by the bound wrists and start to untie the knots there.

An unexpected benefit to being physically present, he muses. Although already the thought occurs that he can’t stay that way, not if he’s going to do what he has to. He isn’t sure how to explain that to John, or how much the magician might understand.

Once John’s arms are free, he gently lowers them. They’re dead weight. He grasps the head of one nail between his fingertips, but doesn’t pull at it yet. To be honest, he doesn’t quite feel ready, with no idea what to expect.

“John?”

His gaze suggests cognizance at least, though it meets the angel’s reluctantly. The side of his face is livid.

“Yeah,” he says at last. “Um…thanks.”

Maybe he means for not flapping off. The angel doesn’t ask. He adjusts his grip on the nail, and John, seeming to sense what that means, closes his eyes and lets his teeth grind together.

A thread of force is still attracting both nails to each other, pinning them. It’s not easy to fight, even with angelic strength. The process of removing them takes almost a full minute and is, on the whole, unpleasant. John tries not to make it worse by struggling.

His tie wasn’t a very good cushion. When the angel takes it off, there are fine dark lines where the edges of the silk dug into skin, standing against the broader expanse of rope burn, red and angry.

John ignores that in favor of studying the holes through his hands. He looks impressed, a little curious—and a little queasy. “Well _that’s_ going to be damn inconvenient.”

The angel doesn’t comment on the late hour of that realization. As he suspects John always expected him to, he says, “I can heal this.”

John nods, but winces. So the angel also doesn’t comment on the fact that the last time he’d had these kinds of wounds, John had been able to heal himself. Now isn’t a time to tackle trust and control issues, either.

And there’s a bigger problem. “I can’t do it while in a human form. So I am going to have to…”

“Flap off?” He sounds almost apologetic. But he nods again, holding out his hands with fingers spread as if in offering. “Go ahead, sunshine.”

Before he vanishes, the angel tries to maintain as much physical contact as possible, a form of reassurance. One hand cradles John’s wrists, which are still pressed together and trembling. The fingers of the other hand pass over his palms, tracing the shape of the wounds. John almost pulls away at that, and the angel wonders what he expected to happen. If he thinks celestial curiosity would extend to reaching all the way through the holes, or perhaps something even worse.

The angel has to move quickly, because the instant he immaterializes the mortal whose body and quantum pattern he’s borrowed will return. To one with his capabilities that’s no problem. He slips into the higher forms and spares a fragment of time too small to name in unfurling two of his wings, letting them rest over John’s shoulders. Even though there’s no way he could be aware of something so ephemeral, it might add a sense of security to what’s about to become an intensely invasive procedure. He drives deep, forcing celestial grace along human flesh. In a microsecond he reassembles bone, muscle, nerve tissue. It’s done before senses and conscious thought have time to register, much less panic. But rapid healing isn’t much less traumatic than injury.

He returns to physical existence to find John curled up on the floor, breathing roughly, the fingers of one newly whole hand gouging at the boards. What at first looks like some expression of animal instinct may, the angel comes to see, be a more intellectual testing and examination.

“Did I put everything back together right?” he asks.

“It appears so.”

“Good.” He doesn’t hide from his voice a sense of genuine satisfaction. John still looks too shaken to fully appreciate the accomplishment, which is just as well. This shouldn’t set a precedent.

As if he’d heard the thought, John says drily, “That might have come in handy earlier. Spared me at least some of the indignity of nursing a black eye in a drunk tank.”

“We had other concerns then.”

He sits up with a glare, shaking off the angel’s helping hands before they touch him. “Now you’re just flaunting your ability to be cryptic. It’s like you want to piss me off.”

“Yeah, I must be a real sadist.”

His sarcasm breaks the tension, or else John feels much less irritable now that he’s stopped bleeding. He laughs shortly. “That you are, angel.”

He remains on the floor. The angel crosses the room and picks up the whiskey glass, but recent intimate experience with the human body reminds him, _water._ He fills the glass at the sink and watches John drain it. There are cigarettes sitting on the table beside the bottle and ashtray, but the angel isn’t going to bring those over, either. Perhaps John knows better than to try, because he only holds the glass out wordlessly for a refill. The bruising on his wrists was healed along with his hands. The blood has dried around the rent in his shirt, and a scab shows through it. His hair is still bloodstained, too.

Physically, he’s fine. A little dehydrated, but the water is taking care of that. He’ll need a shower. And want a cigarette, in more or less that order. But beforehand, he might need something more. The angel senses incompleteness, plaintive human need. For what he isn’t sure, and John might not be able to say either.

The distraction _does_ seem to have done some good for him. The relaxation the angel had glimpsed before it complete; he’s utterly at home in his skin. He looks refreshed, although at the same time, his exhaustion is clear. And his vulnerability.

The angel folds his hands, with a gesture that in other planes would also settle wings. “Thank you, John,” he says.

That startles him so much the water in his glass jumps, though it doesn’t spill. He looks up with raised eyebrows, but before he can select just the right irony to reply with, the angel continues, “You did well.”

He shrugs, like an embarrassed child squirming. “Really?”

“I said before that I…admire…human capacity to endure suffering. And you—”

John doesn’t let him finish. “You know, I hardly get any thanks after I _properly_ save the day, but this earns your admiration?”

The angel tips his head to one side, smiling. “If you like, I can start being more vocal in my gratitude on other occasions, too.”

His eyes narrow suspiciously, then roll. As the angel suspected, the offer is not taken up.

But it met whatever unspoken need John’s vulnerability had been semaphoring. It will be all right to leave him on his own soon.

“One last thing,” the angel says. “When I do flap off—” John smirks “—someone else will take my place. Do you feel prepared to handle it?”

The magician stumbles to the couch, drops on it, sets the empty water glass down. He meets Manny’s eyes in the mirror. “Perhaps you could go back out the door first?”

#

The flogging goes smoothly.

John’s belt, folded twice, hums through the air and cracks against skin. The marks it leaves are vibrant red, striping his back and shoulders like a script in some obscure alphabet. If the angel wanted to he could spell out a message in any of a number of actual letters; it didn’t take long to learn how to control the way the makeshift flogger falls.

Where the nails were pointed and sharp and cruel, this pain is broader and more generous. It forms rhythms: falling, stinging, fading, smarting. There is a moment, briefer than a second, when the smart fades and before the next blow falls, when there is only relief.

Relief and anticipation.

John told him about this. They’d had another conversation—just talking—about pain. The angel did not ask, in so many words, why John sought it out. But he listened very closely.

John had talked about relief. “Sometimes, if you hold yourself just right, you win an instant, one blessed instant where it doesn’t hurt so much. And it’s like air after drowning, the best damn feeling I can imagine.” He breathed deeply, then,  cigarette glowing in his fingers. “Like Heav—” But he didn’t complete that thought.

The angel did not ask, “ _So you’re getting me to hurt you just because it feels so good when I stop_?” That isn’t all of it.

But the angel _is_ hurting him. John seems to shy from the thought of self-flagellation, as if that might mean becoming his own punchline. Still, he suggested the strap—bashfully, in a way that discouraged further discussion besides _yes, that will do_. And other logistics: they have a symbol, this time, for if he needs to stop. He’s naked, because that’s easier, cleaner. Rather than rope, they’re using padded cuffs that spread his ankles and wrists. It’s not the first time the angel has seen him handcuffed to a bed.

He pulls against the restraints sometimes, while the flogger comes down on his back with inhuman regularity. John flinches as it connects, but he doesn’t try to escape it. It’s only the surprise, the sudden reminder of whatever pain means to him.

_You again? So soon?_

_Of course._

Surrender and relief look the same to the angel, so he can’t tell when John gives in to the inevitable and when instead he fights for and wins an instant of blessed painlessness. Perhaps he’ll learn to with further study. Tension—fighting, enduring—release. The blow falls. The strap stings. The sting fades. Its lingering reminder is a crimson line, part of a fan shape taking form.

The angel doesn’t consider this revenge for the incident at the hospital; he doesn’t think John does, either. He still is not certain of his own opinion about that incident—it was undignified, unasked for, useful in some ways, and edifying. He understands a little bit about agony firsthand now. The talk with John had helped to process that, though the angel never made his motive known. It felt too vulnerable, and he has found he also shies from vulnerability. And in the end, he probably could have learned as much just from talking and observing, like he is now. The sheer meaty, gross, helpless, disgusting essence of the human experience is better endured by someone who is much more accomplished at it.

The belt buckle leaves an imprint of deeper red above John’s hip and draws a sharp sound from him. The angel doesn’t apologize, but he’s careful not to repeat it. He doesn’t think John would enjoy many more of those, and they don’t contribute to the pattern he’s building, the rhythm of steady strokes of pain.

Even while he’s observing, another part of him is musing on more memories of the hospital. He’d eaten lunch in the cafeteria there, which was further trove of unexpected experiences. He’d be more interested in repeating those, but has reconciled himself to not encountering flavors again. Other parts of digestion (including its sudden interruption by encounters with corpses) he’ll miss less.

He won’t miss sex, either, although at the time it had been enjoyable. Also messy and distracting, meaty and undignified—in some ways like pain, and with much less choice and coordination than putting together and eating a meal had held. It was satisfaction for a need the angel didn’t have. And, he supposes, for prurient curiosity, which he had in a very limited amount. It had been possible that in some point in the conversation about pain John might have asked why the angel wasn’t curious about other human experiences or drives, including both eroticism and gastronomy. It turned out that he didn’t. In the time since the flood, the angel has seen enough to know that neither drive taps into universal human experience. Tastes differ. For some food is nothing but necessity, for others a source of active discomfort, physical or psychological or both. Interest in sex runs along a similar continuum, and some mortals live happy lives without a moment of concupiscent pleasure. But none of them has ever lived free from pain. John Constantine is as aware of that as any angel.

Which raises again the question—by this time the angel greets it like an old friend—why _does_ pain take him by surprise? Perhaps it isn’t surprise, but only a self-preserving reaction to the warning that something has gone wrong. Perhaps he does anticipate it, always, but mere expectation is nothing to the insistent reality. The angel is too familiar with that, now. Or perhaps there’s something that subverts his expectations not in the sensation itself but in his reaction to it. The reason he is seeking it now.

At some point the angel has started assuming John seeks pain for its own sake, and isn’t just enduring it for the sake of an education. The turning point was with the nails. That was not a courtesy. It went beyond any attempt at establishing rapport.

The flagellants, the ones he refuses to mimic entirely, they had their own reasons for seeking out pain. They sought purity. Distraction from the entanglements of the world. From John Constantine, that motive seems unlikely. He doesn’t want or need distraction from _pleasure_.

In the end, the angel may not be equipped to ever get to the bottom of what pain means for John. It might require organs of knowledge or understanding that he doesn’t have. And that is all right. He has still, he feels, learned much.

He pauses, letting the lash rest at his side. John breathes out a long, low sigh. The angel takes hold of his shoulder as if shaking a sleeper awake.

“Yeah,” John says in reply to some question he thinks the touch asks. The angel nods and moves down, following the stripes on his back, tracing welts. He stops with his fingers poised between two of them. They rest there, as if he can absorb sensation from the contact. In a way he can, similar to the way he can smell substances like dried myrtle, candle wax, whiskey, blood, sweat, and cigarette smoke. It’s a matter of knowledge only. Just as smell means less when there’s no bodily reaction (a watering mouth or nausea as the case may be), touch gives only an impression of pressure and temperature; it doesn’t _feel_ like anything.

The angel doesn’t really miss feeling, doesn’t miss being completely at the mercy of whatever next touches his skin. Now he can _cause_ sensations. He’s the reason for the welts under his fingers. And that, too, is all right.

The beaten skin is very warm. _Hot and getting hotter._ The angel doesn’t know at what point heat turns into pain. He may yet learn.

“John?” he says. “How are you?”

His head shifts on the pillow. “I think…” His voice is faint; the angel bends closer to hear and is rewarded with the faintest dry note in the following words, “I think you can turn me over, I’m done on this side.”

The angel smirks at the quote, from St. Lawrence, which he suspects was not an accident, while also being intrigued at the comparison of flogging with being roasted to death. _Hot and getting hotter_. Yes, he’s learning.

He undoes the straps at John’s wrists, then his ankles. But he lets the magician roll under his own power. It will mean lying on his back, on the welts and lacerations, but he doesn’t seem to care. He does hesitate, though, at one point.

“All right?” the angel asks, imagining the pull at smarting muscles, bleeding skin.

“Just fine,” John says. With a sigh, he turns the rest of the way.

It reveals one possible reason for his hesitation.

The angel understands sexual arousal as a response to stimuli. He isn’t half as embarrassed by the erection as John seems to be. But he is taken by surprise.

Maybe they’ve built some rapport through this after all. Perhaps too much. He gathers what he knows, seeking some answer in it. The angel has _not_ made a habit of following John Constantine into the bedroom, figuring in that area at least the magician could take care of himself. And he had, with some regularity and a wide variety of people. There was one occasion—when possessed children cut a gruesome swath through Alabama—that the angel had looked in on his charge, just in case he’d needed a nudge in the right direction. He found John in bed with his arms stretched above his head, his necktie being wrapped around his wrists by a young woman who in turn tied the other end to one bedpost. She stammered, “Are you sure this is okay? I mean, my boyfriend never—”

“It’s _fantastic_ , love.” John squinted. “Nora, wasn’t it?”

The angel had not remained long enough to hear Nora’s answer.

The situation is not exactly analogous, but it has enough similarities to deepen the angel’s surprise.

“Seen enough?” John asks, with more dryness than irritability.

While thinking, the angel hasn’t been ogling so much as failing to flinch. But now that his attention has been drawn he averts his gaze quickly, bringing it up to meet John’s eyes. Any irritation there has been replaced with warmer humor.

He sits up more, folding his legs for something that approaches modesty. “But you don’t really go for that, do you?”

“No,” the angel replies, not needing to mention the exception at the hospital.

“I mean, I guess… if you don’t—”

And John gives him such a look at the angel has to say, “I _am_ equipped for it.”

“No kidding?”

“Consider what image I’m made in. There’s no reason to divert from type.” Not with something as minor as genitalia. He almost shrugs. “Sex isn’t important enough to edit out.”

The corners of John’s mouth take on a skeptical curl—or _cynical_ may be the better word. “That would be news to a lot of people.”

“I’ll leave it to you to spread the good word,” the angel says with his own dryness. Figuring the man who had given him the _Love as thou wilt_ sermon might appreciate the idea.

“What, that angels don’t fuck from lack of interest, not ability?” John shrugs. “I mean, it makes sense—things squish, there’re fluids, it’s a miracle that _anybody’s_ interested, and not all of us down here even are.” His mouth curls in a different direction. “Anyway, nothing meant by this, it was just a… And I understand you…” His shoulders drop as a light of comprehension shines in his eyes. In a softer tone, he says, “I’m sorry.”

The angel doesn’t snort at this unlikely development, seeing how seriously it is meant. “No harm done.”

“No, but it was damn stupid to overlook.”

He blinks, this time not disguising his surprise. And although this branch of behavior doesn’t fascinate him, some thought has clearly affected John enough that it provokes the angel’s curiosity. “Overlook what?”

“Well, you are a…” A hand gesture that must be intended as evocative. “A bloke.”

At this, the angel smiles. “Who says?”

John doesn’t reply right away. His raised hand drops to the mattress. He rubs at his wrist, although the padded cuffs haven’t left any welts. “Nobody that I can remember. I’d just assumed. And you know what they say about assumptions…” His laughter has more of its familiar edge. “Sorry about that, too—ma’am?”

“Not exactly.” The angel rests his hands (the pronoun isn’t incorrect, simply inadequate) on the rails at the foot of the bed. Mortal language strains to describe _human_ experiences of gender, much less the celestial. “But say I was masculine, what would that change?”

“For me? Embarrassingly little.”

The angel chuckles; John doesn’t. “All right, then, for who else does it matter?”

“The Sunday school crowd seemed convinced it matters very much. On a fire and brimstone sort of scale.”

“As I said, sex isn’t that important.” He snorts. “Aren’t you the one who gave me a talk about socialized guilt?”

“I do a better job overcoming it some days than others.” John’s tongue darts across his lips. “And it’s one thing for us poor sods down here to find our pleasure and another to—well, I told you _I_ wasn’t around when they made those rules. It’s another thing when I’m face to face with someone who was. And to be…showing wood.”

“I wasn’t making those rules, either,” the angel says. A number of things would be different if he had—although that belongs to another conversation. “But I can tell you that Sodom and Gomorrah were blasted from the face of the earth for other reasons than tradition claims.” He leans closer and speaks quietly, with an edge to his voice he knows will have John’s attention. Perhaps even his belief. “Don’t misunderstand me—you are damned. But not for this.”

John blinks, then mutters, “What a relief.” He sounds ironic, of course, but the angel suspects there is some core of honesty in what he says. In response to which statement, he’s less sure.

The angel starts around the bed. As he approaches him, the muscles beneath John’s skin contract in an atavistic shudder. Not repulsion, not exactly fear. The angel might be flattering himself if he assumes it is awe.

John Constantine does not worship. Does not self-flagellate. His concern for divine law seems to stem less from a sense of reverence than from self-loathing (on some level, the angel knows, he suspects everything he does is wrong) and perhaps unwillingness to offend his companion, though that last in itself is unusual.

So the angel isn’t imagining him worshiping when he pictures him down on his knees. Doing what he suspects John wants to do. Knowing him, he’d make a mockery of worship. But the woman, the nurse, she hadn’t been worshipping either. It had been something else, a sort of sharing. She hadn’t thought of it as a sin, and so it wasn’t. It was only something very human. A strange thing to bring an angel to awe. And yet he still remembered her touch, all her touches—especially the way her hand had brushed his, deliberate and meaningful. Mortals could communicate volumes through passing physical contact. It wasn’t intellectual; the angel had failed to anticipate how very non-intellectual the whole matter could be. How intense, even overwhelming, the sensations were when aroused by a simple touch.

She had also shown the angel how to kiss.

John accepts the press of his lips, returns it without hesitation—just a moment in which he seems to gather himself. His mouth parts. Without a sense of taste or pleasure, the angel is aware of temperature and texture: hard palate and rough tongue, moisture that adds a layer of silken smoothness. Heat. _Hot and getting hotter_. He can smell John’s breath and copper in the air. And then comes the pressure of his fingers as John’s hands tentatively cup the angel’s face, then draw him closer, holding him to the kiss. He lets himself be pulled, bracing one knee on the mattress. His limbs are perfectly steady, unbending, without even a tremor as John sucks at his tongue. The magician’s fingertips stroke along his cheekbones, trace his jaw and clasp the back of his neck. If this kiss communicates anything, it’s want. Lust, uncertainty, hunger. A sort of desperation that John would never reveal otherwise. As gutting as pain.

The angel sets his hands gently on his shoulders. He catches John’s lower lip between his teeth and bites. The sensation makes John groan, and muscles contract under the angel’s fingers in another shudder that might be agony or pleasure or awe.

He pulls back, tugging at John’s mouth until he suddenly releases it. There still isn’t anything to say. They rest forehead to forehead, and he can feel John’s pulse beating at his temples. The touch on his neck is moving down, stroking over his shoulder blades. He’d taken off the leather jacket when he took up the strap, even though heat and sweat aren’t a problem for him however much physical exertion he goes through. It felt appropriate. John’s nails dig, not deliberately, he thinks, but in another show of desperation—as if trying to grip him in place. Covering the roots of his wings.

He runs his hands down John’s back in a mirroring gesture, raising another gasp. It hurts. The angel smiles. But when John’s touch stops at the belt at his waist and tugs it in a light question, he shakes his head. “You were right, I don’t really…do that.”

John lets go at once. Their separation isn’t awkward; given who and what they are, miscommunication is to be expected. The miracle is how much they _can_ express. The angel catches John pressing the tip of his tongue to his lower lip as if checking that it’s still there.

When it comes to what’s still there, the kiss hasn’t abated his arousal any. But John doesn’t acknowledge that. With a fluid shrug, he says, “It takes all kinds, love.”

Which the angel doesn’t mistake as a term of affection, yet is affected to hear. It’s not what John would call a ‘bloke,’ and the acknowledgement, though imperfect, is thoughtful.

He steps back and leans against the far wall of the narrow room. “Pleasure is as alien to us as pain.”

“Yeah, I know.” John winces, but pity is an expression conspicuous by its absence. He seems more embarrassed.

“But it isn’t a _weakness_ in humankind. Any more than the capacity for pain is. And it’s…interesting.”

“Interesting?” John’s eyebrows quirk.

“I feel I’ve learned a lot by observing you.” The angel suppresses any sign of his own humor. But he can’t resist an infinitesimal smirk before saying, “So if you need to take care of things, don’t worry about offending me. I don’t mind watching.”

John doesn’t choke, if only because he has nothing, not even air, to choke on. When he does find breath, he lets it out in a long, rough sound. The angel is prepared to accept any ribbing he has to offer—even if the complete definition of _voyeurism_ wouldn’t properly fit—but instead, with an expression of concentration, John does as he suggests.

He settles with his back to the mattress, forming an awkward arc to avoid too much contact between the fabric and his skin. Even so, rippling movements bring small sounds out of his throat, discomfort he’s too eager to be able to avoid. Rhythms of pain leavened not by relief but by something more solid and intense. His right hand strokes with movements the angel finds unfamiliar yet which are clearly well practiced, instinctual. The left reaches farther back, hooking and probing with no sign of self-consciousness or even of performance for an audience. Humans become so intimately at home in their bodies, fragile and imperfect and vulnerable as they are. It’s not the pleasure or sexual experience the angel envies in John so much as his ease with finding it. He can’t even tell if the orgasm that soon overtakes him—which looks racking, extreme, and so undignified the angel can’t tramp down embarrassment at the thought of enduring one of his own all too recently—catches John by surprise.

He wets a towel at the sink in the bathroom next door and brings it back so John can clean himself. As he does, the angel folds the strap and lets it hang over the foot of the bedframe. He suspects John doesn’t want to continue, not after reaching climax. New-washed, muscles pliant, eyes hooded and expression relaxed, he seems too vulnerable to be hurt.

The magician looks up to meet the angel’s evaluation. “All right?”

“I was wondering if you’d like me to heal your back for you.”

“Like you did my—” He makes a gesture like a wave with his left hand.

“Exactly.”

John shakes his head. “If it’s all the same to you, I’d like to keep these until they close up naturally.” He leans over—his breath catching slightly at the tug of muscles—and rummages over the side of the bed until he comes up with his trousers. Out of their pocket he pulls a package of Silk Cuts and his lighter. He holds one between smirking lips. “Want one?”

“I’ll resist the temptation,” the angel says.

His laughter drifts as a puff of smoke.

He finishes the cigarette without getting dressed, in a silence that is almost companionable. The angel watches, observing another form of mortal pleasure. Breath, he thinks, is an interesting phenomenon. One of the most necessary functions of the human body, and yet John is poisoning his lungs just for a fix of nicotine.

The angel hopes he enjoys it.

“Well…” he says at last, aware of the awkwardness—he hasn’t yet learned how to perform a polite leavetaking. “Will you be all right if I leave you now?”

John snorts. “Absolutely.”

The angel goes to the door. The mortal he’s borrowed will return to themselves in the main room of the mill house, a much less shocking transition than discovering John naked and cheerfully beaten.

Before he opens it, the magician says behind him, “Thanks, angel.”

“Any time.”

Rustling behind him as John rises. The angel remains at the door, expecting at any moment to feel a touch, a hand on his shoulder or back. But perhaps he guesses wrong, because John doesn’t approach any closer. He clears his throat once or twice, as if preparing to say something that never makes it to his tongue.

The angel spares him from trying by saying, “There are others I need to look in on today.”

John makes a sound more derisive than disappointed.  “The legions of Heaven must be short-staffed.”

“Of course,” the angel replies lightly. “Why else would we chose to work with you?”

The sarcasm doesn’t fall as hard as it would at other times. In this moment, they’re still too open to each other for its reassuring cut. But they’re sure to find the chance to use it later.

The angel closes the door to the room with its close scents of tobacco, pain, and sex. He goes upstairs for privacy, and there he once again leaves humanity behind.

 


End file.
